Building Reprieve

July 6th, 2009

The front page of today’s Guardian ran with a story on Binyam Mohamed and his fight to stop evidence of his torture from being destroyed:

The photograph will be destroyed within 30 days of his case being dismissed by the American courts — a decision on which is due to be taken by a judge imminently, Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed’s British lawyer and director of Reprieve, the legal charity, said today.

Reprieve recently relaunched their website and they chose Clearleft to help them. I was responsible for the front-end build; that’s my usual role. But unusually, I also had to build a CMS.

We don’t normally do back-end work at Clearleft. That’s a conscious decision; we don’t want to tie ourselves to any particular server-side language. Usually we partner up with server-side developers; either those of the client or independent agencies like New Bamboo. In the case of Reprieve, the budget didn’t allow for that option. We were faced with three possibilities:

Write a CMS from scratch, probably using PHP and MySQL—the technologies I’m most comfortable with.

Create a CMS using Django which would give us an admin interface for free.

There was a three person team responsible for the project: myself, Cennydd and Paul. We did a little card-sorting exercise, weighing up the pros and cons of each option. Django came out on top.

I had conflicting emotions about this. On the one hand, I was pleased to have the chance to learn a new technology. On the other hand, I was absolutely terrified that I would be completely out of my depth.

I had seen Simon giving a talk on Django just a few weeks previously. I stuck my hand up during the Q and A to ask Is it possible to learn Django without first learning Python? Simon said that a year ago, he would have said No. But given the work of fellow designers like Jeff and Bryan, the answer isn’t so clear cut. Maybe Django could be a really good introduction to Python.

By far the hardest part of building a Django website was the initial set-up. Sure, installing Django was pretty straightforward …once you’ve made sure you’ve installed the right image libraries, the right database bindings, blah, blah, blah. I can deal with programming challenges but I have no desire to become a sysadmin. Setting up my local dev environment on my Mac was a hair-tearing experience. Setting up the live environment, even on a Django-friendly host like WebFaction, was almost as frustrating …no thanks to the worst. screencast. EVER.

But I persevered, I obediently followed the tutorial, and I discovered all the things that make Django such a powerful framework; the excellent separation of concerns, the superb templating system, the lack of so-called front-end “helpers” that cripple other server-side frameworks. I think Gareth was really onto something when he noticed the way that the web standards world appears to be choosing Django.

In the end, Django proved to be absolutely the right choice for Reprieve. It provided enough flexibility for me to build a site tailored to the specific needs of the client while at the same time, giving me plenty of pre-built tools like RSS and, crucially, the admin interface. The client is extremely happy with the power that the admin interface offers.

We investigate, we litigate and we educate, working on the frontline, providing legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. We promote the rule of law around the world, and secure each person’s right to a fair trial. And in doing so, we save lives.